The first rocket streaked low over our house with a crackle at about 8 p.m. I was riding an exercise bike in the front yard, and before I could take cover, the rocket slammed into the pavement behind our house, shattering windows up and down the block. The dust had hardly settled before another rocket flew in. Whump. And another. Whump. A few weeks later, a rocket landed in front of our house and shrapnel hit a neighbor’s guard. My NEWSWEEK colleague Larry Kaplow watched the man die in the street as medics tried to treat him.
For six months, starting in the spring, insurgents pounded our area with disturbingly close mortar and rocket fire that the military calls IDF—or indirect fire—because there isn’t a direct line of sight between shooter and target. But there’s nothing indirect about a mortar that comes crashing down close by, with a schedule you could set your watch to: a volley around 10 a.m., another around 2 p.m. and a nightcap around 6. The average was about 10 explosions a day. I imagined the mortar teams meeting up for breakfast or lunch, shoot- ing off a few shells and then heading back for a nap before starting the next round.
The attacks continued like that for months. Then one day … they stopped. It was late August, and the silence was so sudden we didn’t know what to make of it. The U.S. military had been beefing up their troops in Baghdad as part of the surge, and cleric Moqtada al-Sadr had told his armed supporters to stand down. But would the attacks really stop for good? It seemed hard to believe. A week passed. A month. Then two. Shops were staying open later and life returned to some no-go zones. It’s been three months now since we had a significant IDF attack near our house. Like many Baghdad residents, we’re waiting to see if the lull in violence is only temporary. I persuaded myself to get back on the exercise bike after the close call. But I’ve been practicing my duck-and-cover drills ever since.
